Can You Make Money With Amazon Affiliate Program

It’s a common question; “Can You Make Money With Amazon Affiliate Program?”

The short answer is YES, but as with all affiliate programs, there are some pros and cons that you need to be aware of. If you want to become an Amazon Associate, here’s a few things to consider first.

Overview

The Amazon Affiliate Program (aka Amazon Associates) is one of the oldest and most established affiliate programs on the internet. In fact, they are all over this space, with a huge amount of products and a very powerful platform and ‘backroom’ functionally that supports their affiliate engine as well as the sheer logistics of their supply chain.

There are a number of ways that you can make money with Amazon including;

Selling your own product or professional services (yes services) through the Amazon network

Create and sell an app that you have developed

Self Publish;

an e-book via Kindle Direct Publishing

a print book via Create Space

an audio book via Audiobook Creation ExchangeSelf

Joining the Amazon Associate program as an affiliate marketer of any Amazon products

Joining Amazon Associates is the easy bit…

Whilst the Amazon website is a big unruly beast (there’s so much content on it), the steps to setting yourself up and promoting products as an Amazon Associate are actually quite straight forward.

Sign up to the Amazon Associate program. The link is a little hard to find, but you will locate it in the footer menu under the ‘Make money with us’ heading – Become an Affiliate

Once you have created your account and completed the necessary tax declaration and payment information (you can choose to be paid via Amazon Gift Card, Direct Deposit to your bank account (US only), or by check), then you’re good to go.

Browse and search for products that fit your niche on the amazon.com website. When you find a product you’d like to promote, you can create an affiliate link for that product – using the Amazon Associate Product Link Builder. I personally like to use the ‘link to any page’ option, but there’s also a ton of preset banners and category links of all different shapes and sizes, like the home page banner link shown at the top of this post.

Use these links on your website, if someone clicks the link and purchases a product through Amazon you will receive a commission.

Pros

Amazon is a well-known global brand and trusted site.

They have a massive product range, so finding suitable products to promote to your niche should be straight forward

Their affiliate program is extremely well set up, making it easy to get started, in the knowledge that if your affiliate links sell products – you’re going to get paid.

They operate a tiered commission structure – so there’s a good incentive to grow your affiliate business with Amazon. The more products you sell, the more commission you will receive per sale – from 4% up to around 8.25%.

Cons

Commission rate starts at 4% which is quite low compared to other affiliate programs.

Affiliate link cookies expire after 24 hours. This means that if someone clicks on your affiliate link and doesn’t purchase straight away (or within that 24 hour time frame) you will not receive a commission for that sale.

The Amazon Associate Program Operating Agreement has some extremely stringent conditions that you must adhere to, as they can revoke your affiliation without any prior notice if you breach any of the conditions. If you are considering the program – I urge you to become very familiar with these conditions and what you can and can’t do. This covers everything from;

Link shortening

Email marketing

Breach of copyright

Use of Amazon brand

Affiliate statements on your website (to name a few)!

Finally, – and this is a big one; If you do not sell any products through your affiliate links within 90 days of sign-up, Amazon will suspend your account. (You can reapply, but it is a bit of a rigmarole)

My final thoughts

Building any successful affiliate marketing business takes time – so the low commissions, coupled with the short cookie expiry, are detractors of this program for me.

However, that said, Amazon is an extremely well-known brand and has hundreds of thousands of products. It is a great option if you are just starting out with affiliate marketing and want a safe and robust affiliate partner to learn your craft.

My recommendation is that you ensure you have a well-established website presence AND plenty of organic traffic visiting your website, before you sign up for Amazon Associates.

The golden rule here is make sure you have good foundations in place first on which to grow your online business.

8 Responses&nbspso far.

Hi very interesting stuff. As I am in the middle of figuring the best affiliate program from my own business it is great to learn from what others know. I hope you will include more affiliate programs then I will definitely come back again to check.

Hi John, Thanks for checking out this site. Yes I’ll definitely be looking at more affiliate programs on this site, so please bookmark it and check back soon. You may also be interested in another site I contribute articles to; it’s call PaidBlogJobs and that explores paid writing opportunities online. All the best with your affiliate journey. Kind regards, Karen

Great post Karen.
Affiliate marketing isn’t an overnight business success but a little progress each day will add up to big results.
Amazon has amazing opportunities to sell or make commissions from someone else product.

I’ve never hear of Create Space. Is it like or related to kindle book store?

Hi Vince, yes Create Space is Amazon’s print to order book platform. When I published my book, I created a kindle version and also a paperback version using Create Space. They have a ton of resources so the process wasn’t too daunting… ebooks are great, but some people just want to hold the real thing 🙂 Cheers, Karen

Thank you for this insightful information. I am currently an amazon associate. I like that they have a huge range of products to sell but I wish the commission was better. I also don’t like some of their policies. I wish we were able to sell from other social media services like our facebook page by directly dropping the link. After all, these customers are being directed from our links? I also kind of messed up in which I joined a couple weeks after I made my site. This is because I thought I would have to drop my affiliate links right away as I was publishing. It didn’t occur to me that I could just go back and drop the links after I built site authority. So now, I am hoping to make a sale soon. Are you sure about the 90 day period? I thought it was extended recently to 180 maybe?

Hi Rob, thanks for your feedback, and your query about the 90day period for new accounts, I’ll have to investigate that and update this page if that has changed. Yes the linking from social media posts is a trick isn’t it, you’d think that a sale was a sale, but clearly not where amazon is concerned. All the best with your affiliate website. Cheers, Karen

Thanks for the info. I very recently started building my first site with the hopes of making some money off of it. But with no prior experience, I have relied on articles like this to give me the info I need.

I have been advised to try Amazon Associates but wanted to find out a bit more first.